Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
Keynote Address (Transcript)
Vartan Gregorian
President
Brown University
© Vartan Gregorian, 1993
My interest in this conference stems from my concern about our divided
knowledge, and its implications for education. I am also fascinated by the
possibilities presented by technology for reintegrating knowledge and assisting
universities in the task of resynthesizing information. We are moving rapidly
to the dawn of an information revolution that may well parallel the Industrial
Revolution in its impact and far-reaching consequences. We are told that the
total amount of collected information doubles every four years, yet the ratio
of used information to available information is steadily decreasing.
We are unable to use 90 to 95 percent of the information that is currently
available, and nowhere is this more apparent than at the university, where the
daunting arrival of information in the form of books and journals has been
compounded by an accelerating electronic torrent from thousands of databases
around the world. Today, at the touch of a computer keyboard, we can gain
access to more information than we can possibly digest. But while it is true
that attention to detail is a hallmark of professional excellence, it is
equally true that an overload of undigested facts is a sure recipe for mental
gridlock.
No wonder John Naisbitt, in his popular book Megatrends, bemoans the
phenomenon that the world is "wallowing in detail, drowning in information, but
is starved for knowledge." Undigested facts do not amount to knowledge. The
current proliferation of information is accompanied by its corollary pitfalls,
such as counterfeit information, inflation of information, and apparent, or
real, obsolescence. I agree with Carlos Fuentes, who said that one of the
greatest challenges facing modern society and contemporary civilization is how
to transform information into knowledge. Our universities, colleges,
libraries, learned societies, and contemporary scholars, more than ever before,
have a fundamental historical and social task and responsibility to ensure that
we provide not training, but education; and not only education, but culture as
well. We must provide not just information, but its distillation, namely
knowledge, in order to protect our society against counterfeit information
disguised as knowledge.
This is not an easy task, because in addition to an explosion of information
and knowledge, we also face dangerous levels of fragmentation in knowledge
dictated by the advances of sciences, learning, and the accumulation of over
two thousand years of scholarship. Max Weber criticized the narrowness, the
absence of spirit, of modern intellectual specialists. It was this phenomenon
that prompted Dostoevsky to lament, in The Brothers Karamazov, about
scholars "who have only analyzed the parts, and overlooked the whole, and
indeed their blindness is marvelous." It was the same phenomenon that Ortega y
Gasset described in the 1930s in Revolt of the Masses as "the barbarism
of specialization." "We have today," he wrote, "more scientists, more
scholars, more professional men and women than ever before, but many fewer
cultivated ones."
The university, which was to embody the unity of knowledge, has become an
intellectual "multiversity." The process of both growth and fragmentation,
underway since the seventeenth century, has accelerated in our century and will
intensify in the twenty-first. Today, universities consist of a tangle of
specialties and subspecialties, disciplines and subdisciplines, within which
further specialization continues apace. The unity of knowledge has collapsed,
and the scope and intensity of specialization is such that scholars, even
scientists, have great difficulty keeping up with the important developments in
their own subspecialties, not to mention their field in general.
As Professor Wayne Booth put it wistfully in his 1987 Ryerson lecture,
"Centuries have passed since the fateful moment . . . was it in the eighteenth
century or the late seventeenth century? . . . when the last of the Leonardo da
Vincis could hope to cover the cognitive map. Since that fatal moment everyone
has been reduced to knowing only one or two countries on the intellectual
globe." In the universities we are smitten by our pride, as for one reason or
another we discover what a pitifully small corner of the cognitive world we
live in. The knowledge explosion left us ignorant of vast fields of knowledge
that every educated man or woman ought to have known. The growth and
fragmentation of knowledge, and proliferation of specialties, is in turn
reflected in the curricula of our universities. There are currently, I am
told, more than one thousand different undergraduate majors and programs
offered in America's colleges and universities. This, in turn, has led to the
phenomenon that our students often learn to frame only those questions that can
be addressed through the specialized methodologies of their particular
disciplines and subdisciplines.
It was to address this kind of ahistorical, uncontextual, academic
isolationism that the late Charles Franklin, the Columbia University
philosopher, wrote, "When the study of human experience turns entirely inward,
upon itself, it becomes the study of the study of the study of human
experience. As the study of the study of the study, it does not achieve
greater objectivity, but merely becomes thinner." In every generation in which
the humanities have shown vitality they have refreshed their thinking by
learning from other disciplines, and they have looked beyond their books to the
primary materials that have made the books. They have preferred and performed
an essential public, civic, educational function, namely the criticism and
reintegration of ideas and values of cultures dislocated from their traditions
and needing a new sense of meaning.
Unfortunately, in our universities today the triumph of the monograph, or
scientific investigation, over synthesis, has further fragmented the
commonwealth of learning and undermined our sense of commitment to the grand
end of synthesis, general understanding and the integration of knowledge.
According to Professor William Bouwsma, specialization, instead of uniting
human beings into a general community of values and discourse, has by necessity
divided them into small and exclusive coteries, narrow in outlook and interest.
It isolates and alienates human beings. Social relations, as a result, cease
to be the expression of common perceptions and common beliefs; they are
reduced to political relations, to the interplay of competitive, and often
antagonistic, groups. Specialized education makes our students into
instruments to serve the specialized needs of a society of specialists.
Faced with the explosion of information and its fragmentation, as well as the
proliferation of disciplines and subdisciplines, the faculties of our
universities are confronted with the difficult choice of balancing analysis
with synthesis, methodology, and the relevant course content, thus placing more
and more responsibility on the student to form his own synthesis. These
developments are what perturbed Bouwsma in his brilliant 1975 essay "The Models
of an Educated Man." He wrote:
The idea of the educated man has also been deeply affected by the 'knowledge
revolution,' out of which has emerged the conception of education as
preparation for research. As long as knowledge was limited, relatively simple,
and not very technical, education could be fairly eclectic. Although it
regularly emphasized the formation of character, it could attempt at the same
time to discipline the mental faculties, provide a common culture, and supply a
minimum of substantive knowledge. Yet obviously, the sheer bulk of the
knowledge now deemed necessary for an educated person has squeezed out of
education--and for the most part, even out of our understanding of
it--everything but the acquisition of knowledge in some monographic form. One
result has been a broad decline in the idea of a general education, which for
all practical purposes has become little more than a nostalgic memory. Indeed,
the body of requisite knowledge has become so vast that no one can hope to
master more than a small segment of it. So, in the popular mind, an educated
person is now some kind of a specialist; and, in a sense, we no longer have a
single conception of the educated man, but as many conceptions as there are
learned specialties.
Nowhere is this better reflected than in the concept of literacy itself; it
too has lost its unity, it too has been fragmented. According to The Oxford
Unabridged Dictionary, literacy is the quality or state of being literate,
the possession of education, especially the ability to read and write. Today
we are using the term "illiterate" as a euphemism for ignorance of a given
subject matter, and the term "literate" to refer to knowledge of a specific
subject matter. We have proponents of "functional literacy," "technological
literacy," "computer literacy," "civic literacy," "historical literacy,"
"cultural literacy," "analytical literacy," "mathematical literacy,"
"geographical literacy," "scientific literacy," "ethical literacy," "artistic
literacy," and (my favorite) "managerial literacy." Born in the pages of the
New York Times, this literacy consists of 1200 terms. We are told that
if you score 80 percent or more, you should feel confident that you can engage
in meaningful conversations with other experienced managers. One word that I
learned was "tasksatisfizing," which means the acceptance of satisfactory
levels of performance of many orders. In conclusion, there are at present too
many facts, too many theories, subjects, and specializations to permit the
arrangement of all knowledge into an acceptable hierarchy. Without
opportunities for creative discourse among educated persons, both within and
without the university, without the broad understanding of the premises and
assumptions of various academic disciplines, it is not easy for either student
or faculty, or lay men and women, to pursue complex problems that cut across
the artificial barriers between the disciplines.
Today, in our universities, we face the challenge of integrating and
resynthesizing the compartmentalized knowledge of disparate fields. Clearly,
our age of excessive specialization and fragmentation of knowledge does not
call for the abandonment of specialization: After all, the division of labor
has greatly advanced the cause of civilization. Specialization has always been
hailed as an instrument for progress. It has been a source of the general
conception of excellence. Complexity, by necessity, has always required
specialization in pursuit of the discovery of solutions.
The answer, then, is not to call for an end to specialization, nor for the
castigation of those humanists and social scientists who avail themselves of
scientific methods and technology, nor of those who attempt to provide rigid
analyses of literary texts, social trends, and historical facts. This, in my
opinion, is to indulge in unwarranted snobbery. To scorn sociology for its
jargon while exonerating philology, philosophy, aesthetics, and literary
criticism from that sin is equally unwarranted. Such attitudes remind me of
the Anglican bishop who told the Episcopal bishop, "Brother, we both serve the
Lord, you in your way and I in His."
The scientific passion of verifiability, the habit of testing and correcting a
concept through its consequences in experience, is just as firmly rooted in the
humanities as it is in the sciences. As early as 1944, José Ortega y
Gasset prescribed a solution to our dilemma in The Mission of the
University. He wrote: "The need to create sound syntheses and
systematizations of knowledge . . . will call out a kind of scientific genius
which hitherto has existed only as an aberration--the genius for integration.
Of necessity, this means specialization as all creative effort inevitably does;
but this time the person will be specializing in the construction of a whole.
The momentum which impels investigation to dissociate indefinitely into
particular problems--the pulverization of research--makes necessary a
compensatory control . . . which is to be furnished by a force pulling in the
opposite direction, constraining centrifugal science in a wholesome
organization." The selection of professors will depend not on their rank as
investigators, but on their talent for synthesis.
The need for breadth of coverage inevitably conflicts with the need for
coverage in depth. It is the depth, rather than the breadth, of humanistic
education which we must now defend. The ability to make connections among
seemingly disparate disciplines, and to integrate them in ways that benefit the
scholarly community, hence the educational process, is our major challenge.
Our scholars and our students must be skilled at synthesis as well as analysis,
and they must be technologically astute and literate. Within the university
communities, in particular, we must create an intellectual climate for an
integral process of societal change. We must encourage our educators to
encourage our students to bridge the boundaries between the disciplines and
make connections that produce deeper insights.
The new information technologies are the driving force behind both the
explosion of information and the fragmentation of knowledge. Information
technologies contribute to the explosion of information by shrinking the
traditional barriers of time and space, giving us the ability to record,
organize, and quickly communicate vast amounts of information. The entire
corpus of Greek and Latin literature, for example, can fit on a CD-ROM and be
carried inconspicuously in a jacket pocket. If a friend in Paris would like to
see an article you have just written, a copy of it can be transferred to him or
her in seconds by the international Internet. If one inquires about articles
written on pituitary surgery in the last year, the abstracts are available
within seconds, and the article itself arriving by fax within the hour. Soon,
we are told, any book or article on the most abstruse bit of information will
be instantly available from any networked computer. This will compound
documents with photographs, live graphics, and hypertext links that will take
the reader instantly to any other related book or article.
That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think. But our primary
problem as universities is not engineering that future. We must rise above the
obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize
that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information once it
has been amassed--to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and assure its survival
for use by generations to come.
Information technologies also contribute to the fragmentation of knowledge by
allowing us to organize ourselves into ever-more-specialized communities. Are
you developing an interest in exotic insects, rare minerals, or an obscure
poet? With little effort you can use electronic mail and conferencing to find
several others, in Japan, Peru, or Bulgaria, with whom you can communicate
every day, creating your own small, self-confirming world of theory, technique,
and methodology. McLuhan's prediction that electronic communication would
create a global village is wrong, in my opinion. What is being created is less
like a village than an entity that reproduces the worst aspects of urban life:
the ability to retreat into small communities of the likeminded, safe not only
from unnecessary interactions with those whose ideas and attitudes are not like
our own, but safe from having to relate our interests and results to other
communities.
As well as encouraging the formation of specialist communities, the new
information technologies contribute to fragmentation in other ways. The new
electronic formats and computer techniques, with special terminology,
equipment, and methodology, nicely support the development of "priesthoods" and
esoteric communities. This is not just a quarrel between traditional scholars
and a generation with new ideas and new instruments. It is increasingly a
conflict that is played out whenever any group uses the new technology to
construct information formats or techniques that prove unnecessarily forbidding
to any but the initiated. This may not require malign intent, only ignorance
and indifference to the larger issues of scholarship and communication in a
technological society.
Paradoxically, information technology also presents us with the opportunity
and the tools for meeting the challenge of the explosion of information and the
fragmentation of knowledge. If, on the one hand, the new information
technologies seem fragmenting, they are also profoundly integrative. Remember,
these technologies are fundamentally communication technologies, and their
deployment at the university is, as often as not, an exploration of new
connections among the traditional disciplines, new ways of finding significance
and meaning. The process of assimilating new information technologies can, in
the right setting, help us think hard and deeply about the nature of knowledge,
and even about our mission as a university.
T. S. Eliot, in one of his early commentaries on Dante's Inferno,
described Hell as a place "where nothing connects with nothing." The condition
of absurdity and anomie is often noted as a distinctive liability of modern
intellectual life. Now, near the end of the twentieth century, this threat may
seem to have reached its epitome in the explosion and fragmentation of
information caused by our new technology. In fact, while the threat is real
enough, the new technology brings us new resources for the establishment of
coherence, connection, and meaning. That is why this meeting is so
important--to bring the practitioners, the theorists, the academics, and
administrators together in search of a new pathway for integrating knowledge
and affecting the course of education delivery.
Is this a revolution? In my opinion, yes. Technologically, the dizzying rate
of performance improvements in computer hardware is matched only by an equally
dizzying drop in costs. No one who reads the newspapers can have missed the
comparison between the expensive, massive, computer of two decades ago, which
required teams of experts to operate, and its contemporary equivalent, a small,
pleasingly designed, one-thousand-dollar appliance on the desk of a junior high
school student.
Advances in telecommunications technology also show a startling acceleration.
There are now nearly 10 billion users of the worldwide Internet, which connects
over 500,000 host computers, and new hosts and users are being added every day.
Electronic mail, network file transfer, and remote searching of databases are
now a fact of academic life, totally integrated into faculty members' working
routine. Software improvements are also impressive. While the difficult user
interfaces of older software required a considerable investment in time, today
intuitive graphic interfaces and improved program design have made it easy for
students to use a sophisticated program the first time they encounter it.
These programs give their users extraordinary powers, allowing them to pose and
answer questions in minutes that might have taken teams of technicians weeks or
months using traditional methods.
While the rate of technological change is dramatic, equally dramatic will be
the changes in our organizational structures necessary to accommodate
technological advances. The relevant organizational structure must change to
adapt to the new technology. Until that happens, the real revolution of
technology in higher education will not have occurred.
This was the case for printing, the Industrial Revolution, the automobile, air
travel, and radio and television. New technology per se is not
revolution; the revolution is the difference in how we organize, structure, and
empower our lives. This is, of course, the source of many of our problems.
How do we adapt our organizations and social structures to these technological
changes? How do we exploit technological developments while subordinating them
to our larger purposes? We are too often putting new wine in old bottles. But
discovering the new organizational forms that are required is hard, not just
because it is difficult to understand the nature and significance of the
changes in information technology, but because organizational innovation
requires a sure grasp of our mission and identity as an institution.
Once these forms are recognized, implementing them requires ingenuity,
commitment, and, above all else, risk and courage. Although the revolution is
far from over, there may be a lull of sorts ahead. It is about time for the
enthusiasm and revolutionary fervor regarding the new technology to subside for
a bit, while the methods of exploiting the technology are evaluated and
integrated into the historical identity of institutions. Although not a time
of high drama, such lulls can, in fact, be the most crucial periods of
revolutionary change.
This is the time to separate the confusions and self-deceptions from the
truths and insights, and to effect the real information technology revolution
by adjusting our organizational structures to discern, accommodate, assimilate,
and exploit what is lasting and valuable in these technological developments.
In short, these lulls are times of evaluation and integration, and that is the
business, unfortunately, of presidents of universities.
What can a president do? The role of the president, of course, is not to lead
the development of new information technologies, nor even to herald their
arrival, argue their importance, or warn of their dangers. If presidents are
successful at their leadership and managerial tasks, then there will be plenty
of others who will be doing those things within the university community. The
role of the president is to establish a process that will promote the
integration of these new technologies, with each other and with the mission and
the core values of the university. It is one of active moral and intellectual
leadership. This is hard, and some days the president will be beset by the
prophets of the new technology, as I have been. They will grab you by the arm
and whisper in your ear, feverishly pressing upon you the revelation that
"Things are completely different now. . . .we are being left behind." On other
days, you will be dogged by self-styled protectors of ancient wisdom and the
old ways. "What is good is not new, and what is new is not good," they will
whisper darkly. You will think your faculty and advisers have all become
pre-Socratic: "Everything is changing," announce the breathless Heracliteans;
"Nothing changes," warn the gloomy Parmenideans. To both you will give the
same Aristotelian answer: "Some things change, and some things remain the
same."
Our identity, values, principles, and goals remain the same. The
technological accidentals we use to exemplify these values in the twentieth
century will vary. In fact, these must vary, for we cannot remain the same in
our essentials unless we change in our accidentals to meet the new
circumstances. The president must create the climate where risk-taking and
innovative solutions are encouraged. But most of all the president must create
a community that is totally informed regarding the values and peculiar identity
of our institution. If that can be achieved, and if all members of the
university can trust each other to be motivated by the same shared values, then
the community can move forward to address the problems of technology and the
integration of knowledge.
Very few institutions will be on the so-called "leading edge" of the
technology revolution, but none can escape the risk-taking and wrenching
changes necessary to assimilate its results into its own mission and peculiar
identity. Every institution will be the site of its own convulsion, each will
have its own special solution, and each will contribute something unique to the
collective effort to advance learning, education, and culture.
One more item: Brown University's own mission. I mention Brown because, like
Dartmouth and Carnegie Mellon, Brown was a pioneer in the 1970s for historical
reasons. Tom Watson, the head of IBM, was a Brown graduate, as was Fred Wang,
and John Sculley. In the seventies, Brown made a conscious decision to use
computing and telecommunications in academic life. Since then, Brown has
implemented a sophisticated technology infrastructure and made access to these
technologies a way of life for students, staff, and faculty. It has developed
a support structure within both the computing organization and the library, to
help users effectively utilize these resources. It has made strides to provide
more and more information electronically.
Ruling all of our thinking, planning, and implementation during this period is
the principle that technology must be fundamentally integrated and aligned with
the mission and identity of the university. It is no longer a luxury, but a
necessity. Although the basic vision of building a network of scholars'
workstations is now fairly commonplace, Brown introduced this model to the
academic community in the early 1980s. Through the efforts of IRIS, the
Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, and the Scholars'
Workstation Project, Brown has articulated a vision of the future academy where
an electronic community of students and scholars would have the entire world of
information at their fingertips. They would be able to navigate through the
centuries of text, images, video, and sound with ease. Readily at hand would
be intuitive tools for capturing and analyzing this information, as well as the
reference sources to immediately satisfy the most arcane query. Intense
interaction between faculty and students would be supported by this
information. Infrastructure and special interest groups would form both local
and worldwide electronic seminars.
Our guiding principles have been the following: that the information,
resources, and strategies must be integrated into Brown's basic identity as a
single community of scholars--a university college committed to traditional
ideals of liberal learning and intellectual community. The focus is not
technology, but information and its associated methodologies of analysis,
synthesis, and communication. The real revolution in information technology is
about communication, not computation. We are committed to providing basic
levels of resources and services to all members of the Brown University
community, not just to those who have been the traditional beneficiaries of
technology. Among other things, this means that there is no charge to
individuals or academic units for any computing or networking services. The
institution has taken the position that the information technology should be a
basic feature of university life, similar to the library.
The pursuit of our vision is then guided by the basic principles described
above. These principles have helped us formulate our goals and objectives for
the next five years which have fallen into three broad, interrelated
categories: content, access, and guidance.
Content: To provide a full array of machine-readable documents,
reference materials, and serials, including scholarly texts, images,
databases, campus publications and documents, and materials that support
teaching, such as course reserves and syllabi. These resources may be
maintained locally, or accessed remotely over the network.
Access: To make these databases accessible to a variety of
desktop platforms in the library, the Center for Information Technology,
faculty offices, laboratories, classrooms, dormitories, and private
residences--wherever Brown scholars are at work--and to integrate these
resources with personal information management tools used by students
and faculty.
Guidance: To provide the counseling, training, and assistance
necessary to guide students and faculty through the rapidly changing
world of new information sources, formats, and methodology, thus to
help transform information into knowledge.
After identifying the goals and objectives that make sense for one's
institution, the next step is the process of developing and implementing
strategies that will achieve those goals. These strategies will almost
certainly require, among other things, supplementing the staffing of the
library, the computer center, and the individual departments. In an era of
fixed resources, this means reallocating existing resources. Growth can only
be by substitution, not by addition. During the past three years we have
reallocated $2 million from our base budget for top priorities, and a
student-faculty advisory committee monitors every penny. We also have decided
that technology replacement--periodic replenishment of our technological
resources--has to be part of the basic budget because acquisition is not
enough. Institutionalizing is a must.
Having said all of this, let me also mention some of my concerns. One is the
library of the future. As a member of RLG and the OCLC advisory group, and as
former President of the New York Public Library, I have always worried about
the status of librarians. If we are interested in technological change, we
should first examine how we are treating our university librarians. We are
treating them as auxiliary entities, not as central to the university. The
first time I met the New York Public Library librarians, I addressed them as
"my fellow educators," and they were astonished because they did not consider
themselves to be educators. My regard for librarians is that of Roman
Jakobson, who considered that a librarian is not a technician, but a mediator
between sources of knowledge and those who use those sources. Somebody who
will interpret a text, not merely tell you where it is.
I made Richard DeGennaro Professor of Bibliography at the University of
Pennsylvania so no one could say that he was not part of the faculty. I salute
Harvard for making sure that the librarian is the second or third highest
position among university professors. Librarians have historically occupied
roles of symbolic significance. But, unfortunately, we have transformed them
into auxiliary technicians who are not central to the mission of the
university. One of the things we must do is to elevate the status of the
university librarian to a full member of the community of scholars.
Second, there is a gulf not between the sciences and technology, not between
the social sciences and humanities, not between the sciences and the
humanities, but between information, computer science departments, computer
centers, and our libraries. It is important to bridge that gap. We must bring
integration to this area. This is one reason that in our campaign for Brown we
have pledged to raise $25 million in the next few years, provided the computer
center and the library work together. For me, as a university president, their
cooperation is essential if we are going to succeed in the twenty-first
century. We cannot have the division and animosity that prevail in many
institutions.
The library of the future is of great concern to me because the next step in
the development of technology in libraries is to further integrate our basic
information infrastructure of computing and communications within the
university's traditional source of information resources and human information
expertise--the library. For Brown University, it is crucial that information
technology must be thoroughly integrated into the traditional mission of
liberal learning and into the library.
If libraries are the DNA of our civilization, universities are "knowledge
engines," which use information as their fuel. The primary information
resources of the university are in the library. Without great libraries, there
are no great universities, and we must strengthen the libraries. I, for one,
do not think the book is going to disappear. It is a historical, cultural
object. But there will be a peaceful coexistence between the book and
electronic publications, and I hope this will be discussed during this
conference.
University library directors must be committed to this vision, and I am
delighted that RLG and OCLC are collaborating. Ownership does not matter any
more, only access, because technology has democratized knowledge. My only
concern in this domain is the federal government because although, as
taxpayers, we have sponsored research, yet we are being charged for the
telecommunications access to that research.
My other concern is that while we have a technology plan, we have no
educational plan in our universities. Technology has not been included in
curricular planning. Technology is allowing us to radically modify the
space-time constants that link people together. But this significant component
of the higher technology revolution is not part of our educational planning.
Additionally, because the half-life of information is shrinking, learning
strategies, rather than facts, should be mastered during the college years. We
must train our students in how to analyze and deal with facts, to develop
critical minds, and ask the right questions. As Mark Twain commented, after
telegraph service was established between the coasts, "Maine has contacted San
Francisco, and Maine has nothing to say to San Francisco." Technology is only
a tool; what we do with it is important.
